


The veins of Yggdrasill

by Kes



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Gen, Torture
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-01-04
Updated: 2013-01-07
Packaged: 2017-11-23 16:23:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 1,944
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/624173
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kes/pseuds/Kes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Loki fell through the veins of Yggdrasill and landed on a desolate planet, where in between fighting to survive he began to plot revenge. What he didn't know was that Thanos was waiting for his magic to give away his location.</p><p>(The events between Thor and the Avengers.)</p><p>(Sorry, this one will have to stay as a WIP because I can't actually access the file - my computer has eaten it. I might get around to redoing it, but I doubt it.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The void

Letting go turned out to be one of those decisions that you carefully avoided examining until it seemed not a decision at all. _My hand was slippery_ , he told himself, _Thor was shaking me off_ , and once the wounds had begun to scar over and he had had time to think he even believed it.

That was after, though. Before, Loki fell through the rip in the universe just as it closed, curled up in a ball and hurtled through the intricate network of natural cracks and wormholes that traced the flickering veins of Yggdrasill. Probably they went beyond it. It couldn't be called falling, not when there was nothing to fall to; only his momentum away from Asgard sustained through pathways that darkened to colours he couldn't comprehend. The void tore at him, ripping at every inch of exposed skin and shredding his cloak, even pulling bits off his armour. He'd never tried to do this without the protective carapace that the Bifrost gave or that he could conjure for himself with the time and equipment, and there were easier ways between the worlds anyway with the right preparation, clothes and devices.

All that could be hoped was that when he shot out of the veins of the worlds' tree it would be onto a planet, rather than the emptiness of space.

The nightmare continued as he frantically did the calculations that yielded a breath of air inside his mouth as often as he could. Anywhere else would see it ripped away by the unrelenting speed of the journey, and even this way forced him to wait for the brief seconds when he passed by a crack into the open universe where the energy he needed lay.

At last he felt himself bounce off something and enter empty space. Cautiously looking up, he managed to conjure more air for himself as a planet grabbed him with its gravitational pull and brought him in faster, ever faster - he curled up again, exhaled all his air and braced for reentry, for impact. Luck had brought him here, but it wouldn't land him smoothly. Loki plummetted, wreathed in fire and drifting in and out of consciousness with pain. The landing proved the final straw and as the dust settled over the crater he passed out at last.

Soon, little eyes began appearing around the edge of the crater. They belonged to large squat creatures with four limbs, and two of them scrambled down on three legs each to get a look at the smoking mound in the centre.

Loki woke to one of them staring down at him, chittering with its head on one side and touching what remained of his armour with its hand. Before it could react to his eyes snapping open he'd reached up and thrown it onto its back. The others fled and he pushed himself onto his knees, arms trembling, and yanked it back before it could run. "What is this place?"

All it did was chitter at him. He looked at it, this odd-shaped creature that despite its bulk was far weaker than himself, and snapped its neck. There was nothing like it in the great library of Asgard. Somehow he got to his feet, the last shreds of his armour falling off him; some of it had been torn off in the void, some burnt away in this planet's atmosphere, and some broken by the impact. At any rate, it was gone. The edge of the crater seemed a thousand miles away but he made it at last, bent double with his bones creaking inside him, and looked out at the planet he'd landed on.

Most of it was rocks, but near him in the west a forest of dark trees or bushes grew so thickly that it seemed to be merely a tangle of darkness. There was no wildlife to be seen besides hordes of chitterers clustering around the fringes of the forest and drifting across the barren rocky flats, and everything seemed hazy in the dim light of a large, dim sun. He hated it already.


	2. New world

The first time he tried to sleep-meditate, the chitterers came. A lot of them came at once and he only realised when he felt them grabbing at him, starting to try to tear him apart between them. One he ripped the head off instantly, the next he threw against a rock and killed, the third he tore the throat out of – they were beneath him, so far beneath him, but there were so many of them he knew the danger and fought tooth and nail.

In the end they retreated, hissing, and he looked at his work. Bodies filled the little hollow he’d hidden himself in and blood was trickling over his body, none of it his – they could have overwhelmed him or taken him unawares, but they couldn’t deal much physical damage. He was now exhausted again, with the pains of his fall back in full, and so incredibly hungry.

Snarling, he stopped himself thinking of the feast they were probably holding in his ‘honour’ already and ripped off a dead chitterer’s arm. Bile found its way into the back of his throat and at the first bite he swallowed he heaved, but he got it down him. Then the next bite. And the next. With every mouthful, his hunger retreated.

When he’d eaten his fill – there were enough corpses to go around – he pulled himself clear of the gory hollow and sat down. What now? He was naked, hurt, alone, with none of his armour or equipment and no idea where he was. There was no water, no shelter, and no weapons. He’d survived, although he still wasn’t sure whether that had been planned or even wanted, but that survival would mean nothing if he couldn’t return.

Water was the priority. It took him a couple of days to find it, days in which he didn’t sleep or rest for fear of the chitterers. After that he went in search of any safety in which to rest; he couldn’t do his calculations and workings without rest, and without those he was stranded. Whenever he could Loki looked up at the sky and tried to work out where he was, but there was no point looking for a streak of rainbow to orient himself by anymore, and the stars looked different from here.

The chitterers made bad meals, but they were the only food he found. They themselves had a diet mostly of leaves from the dark trees, which he could tell would do him no good, but happily ate each other as well. As time went by he learned not to shudder when he tore into their raw flesh, since there was no choice; nothing here seemed to burn.

Eventually he managed to make the illusion of clothes for himself. To do it you had to have a starting point, so he started with the hide of a chitterer and covered it with what looked like his king’s armour. It wasn’t solid, though. That needed the clothes to actually exist somewhere, ready to be phased in and out of this dimension.

There were no places the chitterers would not go for him to rest, so he killed more of them. Every time he hunted he would kill several more than he needed and drag some of them to join his growing circle of corpse-warnings. The others were left to remind the ones that lived of the terror that had come to them. Mostly it worked, but sometimes he still woke up to a group of them trying to quietly smother him.

Sometimes he thought about Asgard, and emphatically didn’t wish that Odin would take the dark paths to pull him back. Every time he thought that he ran through all the words of hatred and contempt any of them had spoken until even the ones spoken in jest became twisted, sinister and full of malevolence. Then he killed another chitterer with his bare hands to show himself that he was no longer the prince who had always fought in gloves with throwing knives. If Heimdall was watching, he should have a reason to be repulsed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The chitterers are actually in the process of evolving into sentient beings, there's just not much life to go around on the furthest twigs of Yggdrasill so they'll take a while.


	3. Bridge over darkness

One night he saw something flicker in the sky. It flickered out of darkness, went a way, and then stopped. Not the Bifrost, but close.

He’d just have to risk the chitterers. There wasn’t enough dark energy here for him to make a barrier – there would only just be enough for what he was about to do – so he piled stones and chitterer corpses around him and shut his eyes.

An illusory copy of him opened them in the void of space, the place the light beam had stopped. Instead of looking towards Asgard, as he’d expected, he found himself looking at Midgard. It lasted seconds before he ran out of dark energy and startled awake on his mystery planet.

Two dead chitterers later, he found himself scrabbling in his memory for something. Midgard was important. Not just to Thor. Midgard. It was so long since he’d set foot in the great library and so long since he’d tried to remember anything other than the crusted scars of the wrongs he felt that it was difficult, but he got there eventually.

Midgard was where the Tesseract had been laid, in the great war against Muspellheim, and it had never been removed. Since the jotnar had fallen no power had posed a threat to it – but the Midgardians must be learning to use it.

There was a way. Midgard couldn’t stop him, Loki, and even if he couldn’t take Asgard right away it would serve as a base. If they could be persuaded to point the Tesseract this way, misled in their calculations so that it was left open, he could get there from this terrible, bleak world. The cracks were out of reach – he couldn’t muster the dark energy to reach them – but the Tesseract could reach down for him.

Better still, now he knew where Midgard was.


	4. Words to the wise

To Loki's surprise, the Tesseract hadn’t been the source of the flickering that had drawn his attention. Once he saw her tech he ignored Jane Foster and, on the next of his seconds-long projections to Midgard, focussed on the energy given off by the Asgardian artefact. When he fell back, exhausted, he thought he had its location.

By that point he had mostly healed. Some of him was still raw and bled at a touch, but when he walked it no longer hurt. It let him be a little bit less cautious, although the chitterers had by then learned to fear him and avoid his haunts. For resting that was a good thing, but it made hunting difficult. Sometimes he killed more when he found them, just because he was angry that they were now hard to catch.

His next trip to Midgard found him in the bowels of a building, facing the Tesseract and whispering in the ear of Selvig. SHIELD’s choice of scientist was a gift; with Selvig on his side Thor would hesitate to attack, if he felt the need to deprive Loki of his birthright again. Besides, it would hurt. Just like Loki taking Midgard for his throne and base against Asgard would hurt.

After that he was forced to move south because the chitterers were moving, fleeing rather than migrating. They hadn’t fled him like this, and he killed more of them for that; he was more dangerous than whatever had set them off! He, who was of Asgard if not Asgardian, was surely the greatest threat on this barren planet.


End file.
